Does gender matter in the adoption of digital land market? Evidence from rural household welfare in Nigeria
Abdulrazaq Kamal Daudu
Digital innovation has already transformed numerous business sectors and provides a huge opportunity to address challenges including those facing the global land market. However, disparities concerning access and use of digital land market services effectively have long existed between individuals, households, businesses, and geographic regions. One such divide is the gender gap, where a particular gender significantly lags behind their counterparts in digital land market services access and usage. This study seeks to investigate if the adoption of digital land market services has led to successful digital inclusion and helped narrow the gender gap in rural household welfare in Nigeria. A multistage random sampling was used to obtain cross-sectional gender-disaggregated data from 612 rural households across three states in southwest Nigeria. We measured the impact of the adoption of digital land marketing services in terms of household per capita food consumption expenditure. The study used different matching techniques and an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model which controls for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity, a commonly used method in adoption impact analysis. We first estimate the determinants of adoption of digital land marketing services across gender and found that age, education, size of land owned, awareness, access to the internet, and training on digital land marketing are common factors that are statistically and significantly associated with the adoption of digital land marketing among male and female households. Findings show that there is a significant difference between male and female rural households in terms of their welfare status despite the adoption, with male households being better off compared to their female counterparts. Using a robust econometric (ESR) model, our findings show that the impact of the adoption of digital land marketing services is effective at enhancing male and female households’ welfare outcomes. Therefore, policies that are aimed at scaling up digital land marketing services adoption among households would help bridge the gender gap in welfare status, which may impact their food consumption expenditure positively.
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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